[Year 12 IT Apps] 2009 ITA exam mistake in the examiner's report.

[Mark KELLY]

Remember the nasty spreadsheet questions from the 2009 ITA exam?  (See
http://www.vceit.com/postmortems/2009ita/index.htm for an analysis.)

There's more.

Q12, the VLOOKUP question, is the culprit again.  Not only are the table's
cutoff values incorrectly set up so the spreadsheet would return inaccurate
answers, but a little bird has pointed out that the suggested answer in the
examiner's report was also wrong:

*=VLOOKUP(C6, $F$8:$G$10,2) or =VLOOKUP(C6, F$8:G$10,2)
These were the most frequent correct responses. Other correct responses were
also awarded a mark. Most students had
difficulty in writing this formula.
*
I pity any student relying on the accuracy of this authoritative answer.  It
should be (using the examiners' clumsy preferences for the dollar sign
rubbish instead of a lovely named range):

*=VLOOKUP(C6, $F$8:$G$11,2) or =VLOOKUP(C6, F$8:G$11,2)*

The irony of the examiners' comments on the quality of students' answers is
delightful.

I hope the person who wrote 2009's spreadsheet questions was not signed up
again for the 2010 exam: they really were woeful.

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager Information Systems
Reporting Manager
IT Learning Area Manager

McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204
Victoria, Australia
Direct line / Voicemail: +613 8520 9085
Fax +613 9578 9253
kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au

VCE IT Lecture Notes: http://vceit.com
Moderator: IT Applications Edulist

My cow died on this day two years ago.  I know because I noted it in my
dairy.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/itapps/attachments/20101104/7dbdc7b7/attachment.html